XV

I have just been looking through an old, old note-book of mine, the

sort of book compiled, I suppose, by every man who really sets out on

the long road. I remember buying the thing, a stout volume with

commercially marbled covers, at a stationer's shop in the Goswell

Road. I wonder if the salesman dreamed that it would be used by the

grimy apprentice to transcribe extracts from such writers as Kant and

Lotze, Swinburne and Taine, Emerson and Schopenhauer? How strong, how

dear to me, was all that pertained to Metaphysic in that long ago!

Often, too, I see original speculations, naive dogmatism, sandwiched

between the contextual excerpts.

Worthless, of course--it should be hardly necessary to say so. And

yet, as I turn the leaves, I get occasional glimpses of real thought

shining through the overstrained self-consciousness, illuminating my

youthful priggishness of demeanour. For instance, how could I have

been so prescient to have coupled Emerson and Schopenhauer together

so persistently? Here, smudged and corrected to distraction, is a

passionate defence of the former, occasioned by some academical

trifler dubbing him a mere echo of Carlyle and Coleridge. I almost

lived on Emerson in those days, to such good purpose, indeed, that I

know him by heart. And, if I mistake not, he will come to his own

again in the near future, when there will be no talk of Carlylean

echoes.

All alone, sharing its page with no other thought, is this, to me,

characteristic phrase: "_Mental Parabolism_, _N. B._" It was like a

shock to see it once more after all these years, and I have been

trying to understand it. It was born, I think, of my frenzy for

analogizing. I wanted some analogy, in physical phenomena, for

everything in my mental experience. Professor Drummond was to be left

infinitely in the rear. And by parabolism, it seems according to a

later note, I meant that a man's intellectual career is a curve, and

that curve is a parabola, being the resultant of his mental mass into

his intellectual force. The importance of this notion impresses me

more now than then. It will explain how men of indubitable genius stop

at certain points along the road. They can get no further, because

their mental parabola is complete. All that has happened since is to

them unreal and unimportant. One man I know exemplifies this to a

remarkable degree. His parabola starts at the seventeenth century,

rises to its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian period, continues

with scarcely abated vigour as far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines

towards Trollope and--ends. To speak of Meredith and Tolstoi, Ibsen

and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. The energy is exhausted, the mind

has completed its curve; the rest is a quiet reminiscence of what has

been.

It pleases me to think that there may be some grain of truth in all

this, though I am not unmindful of the inevitable conclusion, that my

own parabola will some day take its downward course, and I shall sit,

quiescent, while the younger men around will demand stormily why I

cannot see the grandeur, the profundity, of their newer gods. There

lies the tragedy. Those gods, quite possibly, _will_ be greater than

mine--_must_ be, if my belief in man be worth anything. Yes, that is

the tragedy. I shall be at rest, and the youths of the golden future

will be seeing visions and dreaming dreams of which I have not even

the faintest hint.

I feel this most keenly, when reading Nietzsche, that volcanic

stammerer of the thing to come. I feel, "inside," as children say,

that my parabola will be finished before I can win to the burning

heart of the man. It frightens me (a sign of coming fatigue) to launch

out on one of his torrents of thought--veritable rushing rivers of

vitriol, burning up all that is decaying and fleshly, casting away the

refined, exhausted, yet exultant spirit on some lonely point of the

future, where he can see the illimitable ocean of race-possibilities.

"_Oh, noon of life! Delightful garden land! Fair summer Station!_"

So, writing (steadying myself against the Atlantic roll) one fresh

thought in the blank left for it in the long ago, I close the book,

and take up my present life once more.

"The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously." Perhaps one may

judge of a man's power by his reception of that aphorism. For me, at

any rate, there is but unconditional assent. To live dangerously! How

nauseous to me is the maternal anxiety of some of my friends. They

are so anxious for me. It is such a dangerous trade. And so on.

I have been scanning a newspaper left in the mess-room, and it has

provoked me to further thought. I see, in retrospect, those myriads

of nicely dressed, God-fearing suburbans in their upholstered local

trains, each with his face turned towards his daily sheet, each with

his scaly hide of prejudice clamped about his soul, each placidly

settling the world's politics and religion to his own satisfaction,

each taking his daily dram of news from the same still. I look into my

own copy and read on one page of a society bazaar where Lady So-and-So

and the Hon. Alicia So-and-So "presided over a very tasteful stall of

dwarf myrtle-trees," etc.

In another column I am informed that some person or other, of whom I

have never heard, has gone to Wiesbaden. The leading article is

devoted to a eulogium of some football team, the special article asks,

"Can we live on twopence a day?" You cannot imagine how unutterably

turbid all this appears to me, out on the green Atlantic. It is

Sunday, and so we rest; but yesterday afternoon I was out in one of

the lifeboats, line-fishing for cod. The great green rollers came up

from the south, and the boat rode the billows like a cockle-shell. How

I would like to have had some of those city folk with me in that

up-ended lifeboat, their hands red with the cold sea water and scarred

with the line as it ran through their fingers to the pull of a

fourteen-pounder. Dwarf myrtle-trees! Wiesbaden! God! Let them come

below with me, let me take them into our boilers and crush them down

among those furred and salt-scarred tubes, and make them work. They

used to tell me, when I said I loathed football, that I did not know I

was alive. Do they, I wonder?

Yes, the newspaper came to me like a breath of foul city air. Very

much in the same way I was affected by a remark made to me by my

friend the Mate. "Where I live," said he, "one child won't play with

another if its father gets five shillings a week more'n t'other's

father." We were talking Socialism, if I remember rightly, and that

was his argument against its feasibility. I did not notice the

argument; I fell to thinking how odd it must be to live in such an

atmosphere. How is it we never have it in Chelsea? I have never been

the less welcome because my host or hostess has as many pounds a week

as I have a year. My old friend of my 'prentice days--dear old Tom,

the foreman, and Jack Williams, the slinger, they get no colder

welcome from us because they live in Hammersmith or Whitechapel. Have

we ourselves not seen in our rooms rich and poor, artist and mechanic,

writer and labourer? Nay, have we not had German clerk and Chinese

aristocrat, German baron and Russian nihilist? What is it that permits

us to dispense with that snobbery which seems almost a necessary of

life to the people where the old Mate lives! I think it is lack of

imagination in our women-folk, and the fetish of the home. For surely

the utter antithesis of "home" is that same "dangerous life." These

young men who economise and grow stingy in their desperate endeavour

to establish a "home nest," some "Acacia Villa" in Wood Green or

Croydon--what can they know of living dangerously? Their whole

existence is a fleeing from danger. Safe callings, safe investments,

safe drainage, safe transit, safe morality, safe in the arms of Jesus.

_Is_ it lack of imagination?